Is Gaming Compromising Your Brain Power?

Gaming for a lot of people of all ages has been a new and exciting way of relaxing after school or after work. It also has been thought that improves your thinking and your skills like working in a team or thinking on how to solve problems that you confront in various situations.

But a study published in Molecular Psychiatry and conducted by Greg West from the Montreal University shows us a negative effect which gamers might not like when they hear!

Gaming May Be Harmful

People who play action games have less gray matter in their brain. The hippocampus is at risk and due to a decrease in grey matter a person may develop brain illnesses such as depression, Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia.

The hippocampus is essential as it’s the part of the brain which helps you orient in space or remember some past memories. For example, taxi drivers who use their brain to orient themselves have a healthier hippocampus.

West accepts that gaming develops visual attention and the short-term memory, but at the cost of affecting the hippocampus. The study contained full scans of the brains of people who usually played video games and to those who didn’t play at all.

How Does The Hippocampus Suffer From Gaming?

Another part of the brain is the striatum which has an area named caudate. The caudate is an auto pilot which helps us get home from work or rewards us. It also tells the body when it needs food, water and other basic needs. Besides these chores, the caudate will help us remember things like riding the bicycle or create habits.

According to the studies, they saw that gamers use their caudate nucleus more while the hippocampus loses cells.

The research was conducted on 100 people, 51 men and 46 women, which played for 90 hours a variety of games, such as Call of Duty, Borderlands 2 or Super Mario Series.